Chapter V: Part 5

The child begins with crude sex alone. It innocently indulges itself in sensual pleasures. It loves kissing and to be kissed, stroking and to be stroked, fondly contemplating its excretions. The civilized society into which it is born magnifies the importance of these insignificant local sensations, gives them intellectual depth. It creates a handsome receptacle, love, to contain the humours of this unnaturally enlarged instinct.

So much at any rate for the male child: parental care nurtures masturbation into love and marriage. Sex may stop short of love at lust. It may be anything it pleases, so long as it satisfies the standard measurements for social impressiveness.

The female child has a different history. She shares a short period of sexual casualness with the male child, at the end of which she immediately becomes a candidate for the recipience of masculine love; while the sexual training of the male child is intensified at this point. This difference accounts for the so-called early maturity of the female child. For at the time when her male contemporary is only a first-year man she is already a graduate without benefit of education; and her proper mate is therefore a graduate.

Although intelligent people are generally aware of the equivocal background of love and marriage, they nevertheless go on marrying for the relaxation and social ease that comes of doing what every one else is doing. Any other course would be socially unintelligible; and explanations are indecent. Imagine a man and a woman both undeformed by sex tradition and that an intimacy exists between them. The intelligent major part of their intimacy incorporates sex without sentimental enlargement: it is an effect rather than a cause. And it is eventually absorbed, it undergoes a diffusion, it is the use of an amenable physical consciousness for the benefit of mental consciousness.

But traditionally sex would be the cause not the effect of such an intimacy. The conventional language of love could scarcely express it otherwise; the only diffusion recognized would be the verbal substitution of commendable emotions for gross passions. When the lover said ‘I love you’ it would be socially impossible for him to mean: ‘Our personalities have an intense and irresistible sympathy. I am so conscious of you and myself together that sometimes my sexual glands are stimulated by the very thought of you.’ It would be impossible for him not to mean: ‘My sexual glands, by the ingrowing enlargement of my sex instinct since childhood and its insidious, civilized traffic with every part of my mental and physical being, are unfortunately in a state of continual excitement. I have very good control of myself, but my awareness of your sexual physique and its radiations was so acute that I could not resist the temptation to desire to lie with you. Please do not think this ignoble of me, for I shall perform this act, if you permit it, with the greatest respect and tenderness and attempt to make up for the indignity it of course fundamentally will be to you (however pleasurable) by serving you in every possible way and by sexually flattering manifestations of your personality which are not strictly sexual.’

The diffusion which modern society calls love is the colouring of sex with sentiments which have no connection with sex, sentiments which are not served by sex but serve sex, by making attractive to the finical civilized mind an instinct naturally repulsive to it. They are literary. Sex, in the imagery of Stendhal, is the naked branch which, when introduced into the salt mine, comes out covered with crystal formations: love is the imaginative crystallization of naked instinct. The naked instinct is the monstrous male instinct. The crystallization is an aphrodisiac for the female, in whom sex is comparatively casual: the sparkling branch creates in her an appetite for love equal to the male’s tremendous sexual offering, which she would otherwise shrink from accepting. By this stratagem the male himself does not seem to the female to be touching her; in love virginity remains spiritually undamaged. It is like the doll in a recent Oxford smoker. Whenever the doll was touched, the young person of the piece, who had a psychic connection with the doll, was affected, though untouched herself, so the nun conceals carnality from herself by washing herself in dollish instalments. Love is Masoch’s stately and marble-like Demon of Virginity (‘the deeply rooted fear of existence every creature feels’), a lewd and prudish Shepherdess.

The only courses possible in sex then are love and marriage, misconduct and perversion. Misconduct is masculine brutality, the male’s refusal to dress up the overgrown branch; and feminine indelicacy, the female’s willingness to accept the overgrown branch in spite of its unromantic nakedness. Perversion varies in character. It may be mere animal-like sexual levity. Or the biological cynicism of the species. Or it may occur in the male when love and marriage or ordinary misconduct seem insufficient to his exaggerated sex instinct, which can only be satisfied by an instinct as exaggerated as his own. Or it may occur in the female as a feministic improvement on man-made sex, nevertheless imitating it in its mechanism from an irrepressible sexual nostalgia. Or it may occur, as also in the male, through deprivation of normal sex life--though more rarely than in the male, since her sex instinct is less demanding. Active Lesbianism is a form of sexual derangement resulting from the female’s mistaken effort to become sexually equivalent to the male: passive Lesbianism is a romantic substitution of the feminine branch for the masculine branch in the forced absence of the latter, the crystallization remaining the same.

There is an intellectual side to masculine homosexuality that is never very strong in Lesbian alliances. Homosexuality in men indeed is more often intellectually induced than in women: it is ascetic, whereas women are not sexually fanatic enough for sexual asceticism. The disgust of homosexual men with civilized heterosexual love becomes a disgust with the crystalline aggressiveness of the female body. If a woman is attractive to a homosexually minded man it is because she seems what he calls ‘pure and virginal’--aloof, that is, from her sexual uses. The disgust is really with the aggressive male sexuality which is responsible for the crystallization. Wherever there is great cynicism about sex, in Islam, say, or in France, homosexuality is connived at as an intellectual supplement to heterosexual life. The classical type of homosexuality was far less exclusive and severe than the modern type: it was sophistication rather than specialization.

Whether or not homosexuality is found a satisfactory intellectual supplement, it is at any rate so that it is easier for male than for female mentality to escape from socialized sex. Woman has been too much under the necessity of self-preservation to lay down the weapons of feminine personality and risk the disarmed independence of sexual impersonality. She is the object, or prey, of male sexuality, and her strength lies in the pride and in the obstacles with which she conditions her capture. Much modern feminism is only a sentimental enlargement of this pride, only a shrewder insistence on her value as a prize. For the most part the feminist still has the mentality of the recipient in sex demanding compensation for the indignity of her position; feminism is an unnatural preoccupation in woman with her sexual self.

Woman’s case is nearly hopeless, then. Man is just a little better off: his position affords him the relief, if he is intellectually capable of taking it, of sexual suicide.

§2

Often we spend hours disposing of some small thing not worth five minutes’ thought. We have had it a long time, it is occasionally useful, some one has given it to us, it would be a pity to throw it away, it has become quite a part of us, and so on. And yet it is in the way. Yielding to the tyranny of the trivial hanging-on thing is adaptation. Outwardly we seem to make the thing adapt itself to us. Actually we are adapting ourselves to the thing--a grotesque adaptation. Such a thing is sex, the small physical thing; such an adaptation is the ceremony with which it is decently installed in the opinion.

With sex there seems to be nothing between masturbation (throwing the damned thing out) and romance (grotesque adaptation). Even the scientific attitude is romantic: the implied title of every learned book on sex is _De l’Amour_. The cases in such series as Havelock-Ellis’s books on sex belong to romance; they are the scientist’s storification of sex. After the reader has grown used to the laboratory manner of the scientist he continues to read from sentiment not science; and the author himself continues, like any romantic author, only from the growing morbid fascination of the subject--a tediously energetic mind unhinged by the baffling triviality of sex. Every psychologist of sex is a psychologist of sex because he suffers from a sex-fixation. He is the principal case of his work.

Masturbation is reckoned disgraceful only because it debases sex to less than what it is; the damned thing is passionately shoved out of sight instead of granted pious functional importance in the household of the mind. There is much less disgust felt toward venereal disease than toward masturbation simply because the former is a large subject, the latter a small one. The campaign against masturbation in homes, boys’ schools and sex books is much more intense than the campaign against prostitution. Masturbation cannot be sentimentalized. Prostitution, ‘the oldest profession in the world,’ has an honoured ritual of obscenity and an equally honoured ritual of commerce.

So great is the importance of accepted sex symbolism--the authorized poetry of sex--that any departure from it is classified as a perversion, as ‘erotic’ symbolism. ‘Normal’ symbolism does not even go by its name: it is love. It is not recorded among the cases of erotic symbolism that so-and-so continually wrote of women’s lips, or so-and-so of women’s breasts. But several pages (fine print) must of course be devoted to a few notorious cases (French) of foot symbolism, and of course to the national case of China, a horrible example to the Western sexual mind of perverse symbolism. Lip-worship and breast-worship are normal because they are generalizations: the kiss has become so poetically diffuse in meaning that it does not represent the precise local excitement which is its actual sexual rôle, but a vague spiritual lippishness; the breasts, likewise, are officially not part of the sexual apparatus, but the semi-divine sensual equivalent of that heart-bosom-and-chest sentiment into which humanity has glorified mean sex-feeling.

‘And up the rosy pathway to her heart
The uncapped pilgrim crept.’
--_Byron._

Foot-worship is unnatural because it is local and particular; it connects sex with a physical triviality. It is nearly as disrespectful to romance as if the sexual parts themselves were worshipped.

Sexual energy, if left alone, would adapt itself instead of forcing adaptation, be diffused instead of diffuse. The social mechanism for disposing of sex makes sex as large and complicated as itself, intensifies its masculinity. Its femininity reduces merely to an abstract, passive principle of motion in the great moving masculine machine; without separate social personality. The social self is the sexual self, and the sexual self is the male sexual self: the dramatic pleasure which woman feels in sex romance is masculine pleasure; in witnessing sexual embrace on the screen or on the stage she adopts the emotions of the male. Her innate sexual impersonality if not philosophized, would wreck the solemn masculine machine; it is therefore socially interpreted as mechanical receptiveness, metaphysical unconsciousness, social helpfulness. In self-defence woman becomes sentimentally attached to this rôle: the sexual machine so elaborately concentrated on her confers on her an indignity loaded with prerogatives. Slavish sex modesty is converted into sex vanity. Militant (feministic) woman can do no more than piously emphasize the negative, obstetrical instrumentality of female sex; pretending that motherhood is a rational social end instead of a bigoted natural idiosyncrasy.

This grotesque of socialized sex comes of the stupid attempt of intelligent man to make nature intelligent. Society is the genteel human version of nature. It is based on the assumption that man is a product of the refined integration of nature by time and that it is therefore a superior, evolved nature. A constant forced transference thus takes place from the slums of nature into the respectable terraces and squares of society.

But the very existence of society, of an improved nature, proves rather that man is a product of the refined disintegration of nature by time; that society is in fact a defensive alliance by conscious, contradictory nature against unconscious, consistent nature. And man stands in deformity between them, a creature part social, part natural; but also something else, himself. What is social is unreal. What is natural is unreal. What is himself is also unreal; but unreal intrinsically, not from deformity.

Reproductive sentiment, for example, is an emotional screen to conceal how little we belong to nature. For were we to appreciate this little we should soon appreciate how little we belonged to society. Sex is even more separate from reproductive instincts in human beings than in animal beings. Society therefore strengthens the sympathetic connection between them, this last crucial bond with nature.

But what is this sex that society has raised from a state of nature to a state of respectability among the intelligent passions? A myth in which people half believe to keep up appearances of which they are half ashamed. Only in the private consciousness is it not a fraud; and here, an eccentric mark of physical loneliness, a sort of memory of belonging; when actualized, a momentary extinction of consciousness, as it means momentary consciousness to beasts that belong much to nature. As a public ceremony sex is constantly in need of artificial stimulation; its technique is scarcely more than the technique of costume. It persists through the illusion of numbers, which perform a gross sex-masque, a lascivious fancifying of nature.

Sex is the tribal totem through which society sues Nature for protection and recognition, and through which Nature is ritually flattered. To the Church sex is the essence of flesh. Man is afraid to admit that he lives largely outside of nature, that his body is only a soul, a myth. Instead, he uses the myth to re-establish flesh; God is the authentication of the body.

Sex is the chief religious mystery of man, his most theatrical exhibition of reality. Parents lie in wait for their children, to change their little sexual sillies into portentous symbols. Either they significantly do not ‘tell’ them but work their transformations by a dark force of silence and suggestion; or they significantly and poetically ‘tell’ them. Is the child expected not to see that what is perhaps pretty in flowers is rather ridiculous in people, who for the most part have other interests besides seed-making and seed-scattering? Or to treat as religious truth the crazy information that baby comes out of mother? Unprompted, it finds this just a third-rate curiosity. If it hears its mother shrieking in labour it will report without malice but without sentiment that mother squealed like a pig. Naturally without a sexual conscience, it is gradually bullied into superstitiousness, reverence or horror of sex. Shelley, on being read the passage about Geraldine’s breast in _Christabel_, saw a vision of a woman with eyes instead of nipples. The child’s sight is poetically twisted to see the nipples either so or as sacred knobs of coral. The only way a child can be initiated into socialized sex without deformity of his comic sense is through obscenity, the cynical and painful adult version of the child’s sexual insouciance.

Psychology is the modern church of sex, provoking an obscene Tolstoyan piety. Havelock-Ellis says: ‘We must, as Bölsche declares, accustom ourselves to gaze on the naked human body exactly as we gaze at a beautiful flower’; and quotes the following account of a totem mystery from Ungewitter’s _Die Nacktheit_: ‘They made themselves as comfortable as possible, the men laying aside their coats, waistcoats, boots and socks; the women their blouses, skirts, shoes and stockings. Gradually, as the moral conception of nakedness developed in their minds, more and more clothing fell away, until the men wore nothing but bathing drawers and the women only their chemises. In this “costume” games were carried out in common, and a regular camp-life led. The ladies (some of whom were unmarried) would then lie in hammocks and we men on the grass, and the intercourse was delightful [sic]. We felt as members of one family, and behaved accordingly [sic].’ And Havelock-Ellis himself again: ‘The nose receives the breath of life; the vagina receives the water of life.... The swelling breasts are such divinely gracious insignia of womanhood because of the potential child that hangs at them and sucks; the large curves at the hips are so voluptuous because of the potential child they clasp within them.’ The juvenile delinquent of the streets reacts to this no more obscenely by singing ‘Mother caught her titties in the mangle.’

Lofty reverence of the female sexual organs conceals a fundamental disgust with them. Woman is the symbol to man of the uncleanness of bodily existence, of which he purifies himself by putting her to noble uses. She thus has for a him a double, contradictory significance; she is the subject of his bawdry and the subject of his romance. The sex totem is made in her image and embodies for him the conflict between suicide and immortality. Man himself is unreal. On woman he gets physical reality. She is his nature, the realistic enlargement of his own small sexual apparatus. She is the morphological supplement of his phallus. Through her he can refine, ritualize and vary his monotonous and trivial appendage. She is the means by which he adapts himself to what he is unable to assimilate mentally, to the absurd physical remnant which pursues him in his pilgrimage to extinction and which he appeases by turning aside to reverence. Sex is a perfidious intellectual digression into physical reminiscences.

How does woman play her part as the sacred animal of the sex totem? With ease, since she is quantitatively more sexual than man, more literally sexual; therefore more impersonally sexual. Sex in woman is unemotional, constitutionally well-blended--apart, that is, from the ritualistic education in love that she is subjected to by a masculine society. Sex in man is emotional; it is segregated; it is the last touch of nature in him that haunts and torments him and that he propitiates with pompous and evasive rites. Although, like man, woman is largely not of nature, what nature remains in her satisfies itself without pomp or pathos. That civilized woman is slower than man in arriving at sexual climaxes is due to the fact that her native sexual ease had been perverted by man’s tortuous psychology into a self-stupefying philosophical passivity.

Woman, indeed, is so nearly complete in herself, except for the phallus, that it is difficult to see how it happened, if one sex must instrumentalize the other, that she rather than man became the auxiliary apparatus. Phallic worship in man is not pious but politic (unless he is homosexual, which is another matter); an institution for advertising the phallus to woman, hypnotizing her with it, protecting her from the knowledge that she holds the strategical sexual position. It is perhaps fair to say that as a consciousness man is woman’s equal. As a physical apparatus he is a clumsily devised gadget. From the point of view of their fertilizing powers there are millions and millions more men alive than necessary. With proper husbanding of sperm (an economy already practised with prize bulls and stallions) one man might conceivably maintain the world-population if a somewhat smaller figure than the present were agreed upon as more reasonable and if birth-control were somewhat relaxed. All propagandist display of physical and mental superiority on man’s part, all Rabelaisian gizzard and brain tickling, is an attempt to detract attention from his obviously incidental character as a physical apparatus.

But it is unkind and even irrelevant to over-press the point. What is relevant is that we are in a state of semi-conscious transition between nature and nothing, and the more conscious we grow, the nearer we are to nothing. In this passage sex comes quietly along, obligingly diminishing itself except when man, in panic of annihilation, whips it up and tries to ride himself back to nature upon it. But the passage continues, his hobby-horse is a phantom.

Panic of annihilation, resistance to sexual diminution, is a social emotion. Resistance to sexual enlargement is a personal emotion, the fear of a more brutal kind of annihilation. Sex brings shock; to some rudimentary forms, simple death; to human beings, intricate death, death of self, death of death. Homosexuality is an oblique escape from the violence of this shock. Polygamy and polyandry distribute the frightening physical solidarity of monogamy. Monogamous couples are always hungry for company: to dilute sex. This hunger for dilution is one-half of parenthood; the other half is the regressive hunger for solidarity.

This natural difference between creatures intellectually like is the real perversion. Man is a poetic animal; what is natural in him is pathological. Poetically he is unisexual; when he attempts to make the nature in him poetic he becomes bisexual or homosexual not poetic. It is impossible that through sex nature should approve of man or man of nature. The only way to prevent sex from being a greater source of discomfort than need be is to recognize it as an anomalous hanger-on in man’s journey away from nature and to make it reveal its presence by behaving naturally: bringing about a literal diffusion of physical nature in human nature instead of a monstrous hermaphroditism or a monstrous monomania.

§3

Sex as a petty eccentricity of the individual can be easily disposed of by the individual. As a social symptom it assumes large metaphysical proportions; it becomes a crux between matter and mind. It demands legal control, giving society an excuse for power; economic control (as a medium of exchange), giving society an excuse for motion; ceremonial control, giving society an excuse for language, manners, communication. That is, it gives society an excuse for society.

Society keeps control of sex by so embroidering it with sentiment that the individual scarcely realizes that he is serving society instead of society him. Every one knows, in the abstract, for instance, that monogamy is an economic expression; yet individuals participating in monogamy would be horrified at the suggestion that they were confirming an economic expression. Marriage is not an economic expression, but a ‘sacrament.’ Havelock-Ellis says: ‘Since marriage is not a mere contract, but a fact of conduct, and even a sacred fact, the free participation of both parties is needed to maintain it.’ And not only is the economic significance of monogamous marriage concealed by an argument of spiritual significance, but by a biological argument as well. Havelock-Ellis further says: ‘Monogamy, in the fundamental biological sense, represents the natural order into which the majority of sexual facts will always naturally fall, because it is the relationship which most adequately corresponds to all the physical and spiritual facts involved.’ (Compare Shelley’s argument that polygamy was a biological necessity because the noble horse was polygamous.)

There develops, as a counterpart to public sex, not private sex but academic sex, sex the tradition rather than sex the practice. Sex shows itself proudly as an art. It _is_ art. And as it is the male not the female who tends to express himself traditionally as _man_, art is male art. It is therefore foolish to point out that there have been very few great women artists: why should one look for women artists at all in male art? Art is to man the academic idea of woman, a private play with her in public. It is therefore foolish to point out that many artists, perhaps the best, are homosexual. They are not homosexual. Art is their wench.

By man’s abstractness of mind is meant his personal anonymity; he is a public creature, only mathematically existent. By woman’s concreteness of mind is meant the individuality (man calls it ‘reality’) he recognizes in her and which he attempts under cover of love, to steal. Woman wears clothes, man wears a social uniform. Woman is individual-power (brain); man is mass-power (brawn). Therefore man, though individually a negative force, is as a unit a positive force; defeating woman as a unit, since the fact that she is individually a positive force makes her collectively a negative force. Here is the secret of man’s power over woman and of a woman’s power over a man.

The mysterious ‘reality’ of woman is responsible for her mysterious position. The only way to correct this position is for her to make a mystery of man, to flatter, cajole, bully him into individuality. Feminism’s great mistake is in concentrating on woman rather than on man. Concentration on woman can only increase the mysteriousness of her position.

The antithesis between intellectual and intuitional faculties is really an antithesis between conventionality and unconventionality. Mrs. Willa Muir, is a short essay on _Woman_, says: ‘Unconscious life creates, for example, human beings: conscious life creates, for example, philosophy.’ Human beings are not created by woman’s intuition (Mrs. Muir should know this), but by the fertilization of the female ovum by the male sperm. What is meant is that philosophy springs from the conventional male mind; but that human beings spring from the unconventional female body; and that the female mind is therefore also unconventional.

The male mind is conventional because the male body is a mere convention. The female body is unconventional because it is individualistic: man gets somewhat socially and vaguely just children, woman gets personally and precisely _a_ child. The female mind is therefore unconventional because it is individualistic, that is, because woman is physically an individual to a degree to which man is not. Therefore man is intellectual, woman is intuitional: man is unconquerable monotony, woman conquerable variety. He has a formal, vacant simplicity, she has an informal, experimental complexity. Therefore, since he cannot be entrusted with creating human beings and she can, she must not be entrusted with creating philosophy, which is all he can be entrusted with. She is not good enough to be entrusted with creating philosophy because she is intuitional: she is too good to be entrusted with creating philosophy because she is unconventional.

It is fair to generalize about man because he is a generalization, unfair to generalize about woman because she is not. Man is male, man is ‘the sex,’ not woman; woman is temperamentally unisexual, a person; for this reason perhaps a mystery. Her sex play is literal, hard, matter-of-fact, truly theatrical; the rest is unconventional, a mystery. With man, all is sex; he cannot easily grasp the dualism necessary to any real individual sense. His play is symbolical, realistic; it is ‘the reality,’ protracted by a tiresome, childish patience that never wears out. Woman, to save herself from boredom, is obliged to enliven the scene with a few gratuitous falsetto turns, which he interprets as co-operation. Even at his boldest man cannot get beyond a conventional anarchism. He cannot see that he is on a stage and therefore he cannot see that it is possible to get off; so that his performance is continuous. And he will perhaps never learn that anarchism is not enough. His fine phallus-proud works-of-art, his pretty masterpieces of literature, painting, sculpture and music, bear down upon woman’s maternal indulgence; she is full of admiration, kind but weary. When, she sighs, will man grow up, when will he become woman, when will she have companions instead of children?

LETTER OF ABDICATION

I have done all I could for you, but the only consequence is that you are the same as always. I had the alternative of ordering a general massacre, but I should then have had to go away anyhow. It is simpler to abdicate. It certainly makes no difference to the situation whether I leave you behind dead or alive. Therefore I will leave you behind alive, to afford myself the bitter satisfaction of telling you what I think of you. You will not listen any more than you would if you were dead, but I should not address you if you were dead. Therefore I will leave you behind alive, to afford myself the bitter satisfaction of telling you what I think of you.

You are not gay. You are sticky instead of rubbery. You represent yourself with priggish sincerity instead of mimicking yourself with grotesque accuracy. Because you are photographs you think the photographs are originals. You think seeing is being.

You do not know what you are. I will tell you, though it will not make the least difference to you, since you do not know what you are. You are a conceit. You are what you are not. You are a very fine point of discrimination. But since you do not discriminate, since you are not gay, since you think what you are is what you are, therefore you are not: this indeed is why massacre was unnecessary. You are blind, from seeing; you cannot appreciate the identity of opposites. You are feeble, from a loutish strength of doing; so that you cannot surpass doing, let doing instead of yourselves do; so that you cannot repose. You are cowards, afraid to be more than perfect and more than formal; so that you are only what you are; you have the perfection of mediocrity, not the irregularity of perfection. You are superstitious; you will season the dish with salt, but you will not taste salt itself. You are ignorant; not only do you not know what you are; you do not know what you are not. You are lazy; you will do only one thing at a time; you will act; but you will not act and not act. You are criminal; what you do is all positive, wicked, damaging; you make no retractions, contradictions, proofs of innocence. You are without honour; over-sincere; hypocritical.

I will tell you a story which is in my mind at the moment and may therefore have some bearing on the question. There was once a woman whose mind was as active as her body. And there was once a man who was constituted in the same way. And the combination of them produced a child which was all mind and no body. And no one knew about it. She was, naturally, a woman. Her parents gave her no name but referred to her in a historical manner as ‘The Deliverer.’ Whenever anything went wrong in any part of the world she put it right because she was all mind. But no one knew about it and so it made no difference. When they became quite hopeless her parents referred to her merely as ‘The Angel.’ In the end she was plain ‘she’ to them. At her death she became all body, and her parents, frenzied with disappointment, drove her out. And no one knew about it. Her parents gave her no name but referred to her in a historical manner as ‘The Destroyer.’ Whenever anything went right in any part of the world she put it wrong again because she was all body. But no one knew about it and so it made no difference. When they became quite hopeless her parents referred to her merely as ‘The Beast.’ In the end she was plain ‘she’ to them. At her death she became all mind, and her parents, frenzied with disappointment, took her in again. And no one knew about it.

This is the story which was in my mind and which may have some bearing on the question. The point of it is, I think, that we are all in an impossible position; which you handle by making less, myself more, impossible. For example, it is unlikely that the story that I have just told you would ever have occurred to you. Or if it had, you would have broken down in the middle and called it the end. You stop half-way round the circle in order to spare yourself the humiliation of missing the true end, which is not perceptible in the ordinary way. Indeed if it is not perceived, it makes no difference, the circle goes round and round upon you. On the other hand, it makes no difference even if it is perceived, except the difference of perceiving it, which makes the position, as I have said, more rather than less impossible. So do as you like.

But I shall abdicate if you do, and since you do, I abdicate. You are all asleep, because being awake means being dreamless, and you can only be awake by dreaming to be awake, by dreaming to be dreamless. You turn your back on your own non-existence and are therefore non-existent. When you love, you turn your back on what you love. When you sweep, you turn your back on the dirt. When you think, you turn your back on your mind. Well, keep looking the other way so that I can kick you where you deserve to be kicked. And you will not turn on me but flatter yourselves that you are having spasms of profundity.

Anyway, this is how it is, little wise-bottoms. There is Cleopatra, Rome, Napoleon and so forth on one side, and there is the future on the other side, and there you are in the middle alive. There is that great churning, that continuous tossing up and making of a middle, that bright ferment of centrality; and it is you. My o my o my o, what a thing! But when it was Cleopatra, Rome, Napoleon or any of them of then, or when it will be who it will be, my o my o my o, what a thing. It was not, it will not be you. And what was you and what will you be? You was and you will be dead. And why? Because you are alive now. But come a little closer, darlings, that I may kick you a little harder. Listen: if you was dead and if you will be dead, each of you, then you must be dead now, each of you, you must be dead and alive. Now o now o now o, pumpkins, don’t cry. For just think: there is that great big live middle and it is nice and warm and it is you. But it may also be it. And what would become of you then out in the cold if you didn’t take yourselves in, if you weren’t also you, if you weren’t each of you dead as well as alive? And what difference does it make? None whatever, pets, except the difference of a difference that makes no difference.

I will argue further against what I am arguing for. The you which is you is only you, and not only dead but invisible. And you can never be this you unless you see the you which is it and every one hard round the circle to the end, where you can no longer see, and are you alone. And the result, if you do this? You will be so alive that you will be deader than ever; you will have achieved the identity of opposites; you will have brought two counter-processes to rub noses, the you which you are not, which is you alone, and the you which you are, which is it, every one, not you--and much good may it do you, except to make you deader than ever. And the result, if you do not do this? You will save that much life from death, and much good may it do you--enough to wipe your nose on, when it runs with nervousness at the thought that you will have to die anyway.

Yes, I once knew a woman who spent all her time washing her linen, in order to be always fresh and sweet smelling. But as she was always washing dirty linen and thus making the linen she wore dirtier than it might have been if she had washed less, she smelled of nothing but dirty linen. Any why? Because she was over-sincere and a hypocrite. She got stranded in the fact of clean linen instead of moving on to the effect of clean linen, which is the end of the circle. And you are all like that.

And again. Believing it to be you alone and that you are only what you are, think what a small, mean, cosy, curly, pink and puny figure you cut when you set out to be it at a party of it’s, naked as in your own bath. Whereas, ladies and gentlemen, if you understood the identity of opposites, your nakedness would be an invisibility which you would have to dress large, from the point of view of visibility. And to this it-ish rather than you-ish exterior you would add an even larger and looser-fitting social skin, a house in most it-ish order, a most it-ish interior, in fact. But you do not understand. ‘Boo-hoo!’ you cry. ‘What, hide our naked hearts, paralyse our heroic breasts, sit upon our grave bottoms, swallow back our great acts?’ ‘Hush-a-bye,’ I reply, ‘there is enough going on for you forrard without your great acts: drinks free, if you will only drink, scenery on view, if you will only look, music keeping step for you if you will only supply the feet. Instead of spending money on what you can only get for nothing. Life, lads, is a charity feed the fun of which is in everybody pretending to be a swell and everybody treating everybody else like a swell and everybody knowing everybody is a fraud and no matter. No matter because of death, in which each may be rich and proud, and no fooling. And your great acts? When you are bursting with fraud and charity and can stand no more, sneak aft and do your great acts, like private retchings and acts of death. If they will not come on, repeat to a point of mechanical conviction some formula of dreary finality, such as, “The fathers of our girl friends are lecherous,” or “Philosophy is teetotal whisky.”’

But you are all sluts, your efforts are not biggish, and so your fine points are only untidy and trivial. If you would neatly calculate, you must calculate grossly the whole pattern of it, which is the making of the middle; you must conceive first tremendously, then accurately; you must grasp the general initiative which is it not you. From this, if your application be fine enough, the fine points will resolve themselves. But remember you are no fine small point yourself; you are more and less than one; you are the littlishness of biggishness; you are no fine small point but a fine small point of discrimination. My o my o my o, what a thing, poor beastie, to be but dainty when you would be statistical. The best of you are the worst of you: they over-discriminate, put their hand to their chin, stand upon taste, pick the highest and most delicately scorched plum, and then choke over the stone, dying the death of an æsthete. For what is a single plum, too fine for the eye and not fine enough for the throat?

I might advise you to think; but you are over-eager, all for gain. And thought is just a power of potentiality; as you are of it; as death is of life; without gain. You would make potentiality where there is none, in order to have more thought than is possible; you would turn the future into a bank, as you now do the past, from greed of time.

Or I might say: ‘Have shame.’ But you would only expose yourselves a little more outrageously and hang your heads a little lower. You would not understand that only truly abandoned boldness breeds truly abandoned decorum. Your interpretations are ignoble and indecent. You begin with contradictions instead of ending with them; efface them instead of developing them. As, for example, with sex: you seize upon it at the beginning, tease it, worry it, transform it, until you think you have ironed it out thoroughly, whereas you have only ironed yourselves out thoroughly. While if you had not seized upon it, you would have found it at the end of the circle, had you reached the end, an achieved confirmation of the impossibility that makes things possible.

This is one of my favourite subjects; if I were not abdicating I might discuss it elaborately, for your good. Since I am abdicating, I will discuss it simply, for my own good; for it is one of my favourite subjects. The balance of interest in man, I should say, is with the making, with it, with life; in woman, with the breaking of the making into the you which is you alone, into death. Woman is at the end of the circle, she has only to rearrive at herself; man has first to learn that there is an end, before he can set out for it. And the learning he scorns as childish and the setting out as a deathbed rite. Woman he counts passive because she is at the end, and inferior because, being there, she turns round and starts all over again, to rearrive at herself. He adores her when she remains passive, that is his inferior; and despises her when she becomes his equal, that is, his superior. Well, they are worthless, both orders, when they are no more than they are. And when they are more than they are they are of no use to anyone but themselves; which is right but sudden and perhaps too mean for these mean times. For myself, I might confess to you, now that we are parting, that my happiest hours have been spent in the brotherly embrace of a humbug, not from want of womanliness in me or humbuggery in him, but because I was queen and needed repose. Ah me ah me ah me, what is this all about?

And such stickiness. How am I better than the rest of you? Because I have converted stickiness into elasticity and made myself free without wrenching myself free like a wayward pellet of paste. And what of so-and-so, your popular idol and my late consort? He was a strong man, powerfully sticky but not elastic; when he moved, he carried you along with him, he could not have moved otherwise, freely. And so he had great moments but not free moments. He was terribly alive but too terribly, never more than alive. He was merely monstrous, without the littlishness of biggishness. And what of so-and-so, my sometime lover? He was indeed a darling but an insufferable fop, washing away the stickiness till there was nothing left of him. And many others were darlings, of a sticky gracefulness and rhythm. But send me no more candidates, their embraces are either too heavy or too feeble; and I am light, hollow with death, but strong, of a tough, lively, it-ish exterior.

That is the trouble. You have no comprehension of appearance, what it is. Appearance is everything, what you are, what you are not. But your reach is sticky, not elastic; and so you get no further than reality, a pathetic proportion. Appearance is where the circle meets itself, where you live and do not live, where you are and are not dead. Appearance is everything, and nothing; bright and uppermost in a woman, to be sunk darkly inward; dumb, blind, darkly imbedded in a man, to be thrust brutally outward.

No, I am not confused, my blinking intelligences, but understand too clearly, and that is the trouble. I am unnecessary to you and therefore abdicate. Nor do I deny that blinking is sufficient for your purposes, which are sincere rather than statistical. Or that it would be for mine, for that matter--if I had purposes instead of queenliness. Which is my weakness, if you like--the tiresomeness of insisting upon the necessity of what is not necessary. I admit all; I am not wise but insistent, I am an unpaid hack of accuracy. I was queen from tiresomeness, and I abdicate from tiresomeness. I am not enjoying myself.

But perhaps you would like to know a little of my history, before I retire finally. My mother imagined that she suffered from bad eyesight; and to make it worse she wore a stocking round her eyes whenever possible: at home, a white stocking; abroad, a black stocking; and occasionally, to depress circumstances completely, a grey sock of my father’s, fastened at the back of her head with a safety-pin. From which, our house was full of small oval rugs made by my mother out of the mates of the stockings which she wore round her eyes and which she was always losing. And these rugs made by my mother were not well made, because she imagined that she suffered from bad eyesight. From which my mother, whose character was all dreariness, acquired in my mind a hateful oddness. From which, I resolved to outdo her in oddness, so that I not only imagined that I suffered from good eyesight: I did actually suffer from it. And with this effect, that by the time I was of age I had no more than one rug, and this was very large and square, and it was well made, and not by me, though I suffered extremely from good eyesight. I lived far away from my mother, having no connection with her except to insist that she live far away from me; and my rug was composed of many small squares; and the pattern of each square was different; and yet the whole harmonious because the stuff was provided by me--the finest silk and velvet rags that I could command from others, and which I sorted and returned to them to be made into squares, a square by each of them. And so each who made a square was my subject. And so I became Queen. Perhaps now you will understand me better. But I am determined to abdicate, however you dissuade me. Before I was in reach of your praise, and liked neither your praise nor lack of it. It would not improve my feelings to put myself in reach of your pity. It was not for this that I told you my story. I told you my story to make my abdication irrevocable.

Yes, even now, it is painful to leave you. Not because I love you but because I am still untired; and after I leave you there will be no more to do. I shall indeed be more untired than ever. For while I was with you I worked hard (as you will not deny) and achieved a certain formal queenly tiredness from being unable to tire myself out no matter how hard I worked. But now concealment will be impossible: my insistence, that before I tried to make pleasant to myself (and to others) by trying to interest it in your affairs, will in the future be plainly horrible, as everything is horrible if sufficiently disinterested, that is, insistent. But the horror of my insistence will not be known to you, because I am abdicating. Nor am I to be dissuaded. The stroke that puts me in reach of your pity puts me out of reach of it as well.

I have said more than enough to satisfy my contempt of you. But I once loved you; and I have not punished myself sufficiently for that. What do I mean when I say that I once loved you? That I knew that being alive for you and me meant being more than alive. But you were afraid to admit it, though I was willing to take all the responsibility upon myself. Then I tried pretending to be just alive, I became for a time a partisan of timidity, in order to show you that being just alive was just pretending to be just alive. But when, aside, I reached for your hand, to press it, you dishonourably misunderstood me, you put me in the loathsome position of flirting with you. Then I tried extorting from you everything by means of which you lived, to show you that when you did not live you still lived. But again you wilfully misunderstood me and over-exerted yourself to supply me with what you thought to be my needs and what you assumed to be yours; and stubbornly refused to not live; and were disappointed when I did not applaud your inexhaustibility. And then once more I tried. I loaded you with favours in order to show you that nothing made any difference; that the most as well as the least that you could endure by belonged to being just alive; that you were more than alive, dead. But you repulsed me with praise and gratitude; as you would now with pity and ingratitude if I permitted.

Then I said: ‘I will leave them alone. I will content myself with being queen. Perhaps if I play my part conscientiously, at no time abandoning my royal manner, they will admit everything of their own accord, like a good, kind, though stupid, timid people.’ But my grandeur you interpreted meanly as the grandeur of being just alive, instead of grandly, as the showy meanness of being just alive. You watched me act and admired my performance, but credited me with sincerity rather than talent; you refused to act yourself, paralysed by the emotions of an audience. My challenge, my drastic insistence, made you if anything more timid than you already were. You were hypnotized with admiration, you were, from the vanity you took in watching me, less than just alive. The men behaved more disgracefully than the women because to be a woman requires a strong theatrical sense: requires of one who is more than man to be less than man. For this reason I took many lovers, to humble back as many as possible into activity. And this brought all of us to where we were in the beginning. And so I abdicate, leaving you once more to your heroism. With it you were intolerable to me; without it you were not only intolerable to me, but you would have eventually become intolerable to yourselves, especially after I had left you.

You know only how to be either heroes or cowards. But you do not know how to outwit yourselves by being neither, though seeming to be both. ‘What,’ you say indignantly, ‘would you have us be nothing?’ Ah, my dear people, if you could you would all shortly become Queens.

But perhaps it is best that you cannot. For if you became Queens you would in time find it necessary to abdicate, as I have; and you would, like me, be left extremely unhappy, of having succeeded in yourselves but failed in others.

Yes, it is true that I concealed from you the colour of my eyes. But the distance at which I kept you from myself was precisely the distance between being just alive and being more than alive. I was giving you a lesson in space, not a rebuff. Since we are at the end of things, you may come close to me and look well into my eyes; but since you have not learned your lesson, you will still remain ignorant of their colour. Good-bye. I am going back to my mirror, where I came from.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Mr. Lewis takes a fierce, acquisitive joy in being right: as if it were an honour to be right, and his unique honour. But many people, alas, are right, only with more quietness and less joy than Mr. Lewis. To be right (to see wrong) is properly a sad, not a joyous mental condition. To be right in Mr. Lewis’s manner is to become a self-appointed destroyer of wrong; and so to make oneself a candidate for destruction, in turn. To be right in his manner--so righteously right--is to be God; and so to chasten every one into wrong.